


Chasing It Down

by professionalcynic



Series: Chasing It Down [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:55:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26811016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/professionalcynic/pseuds/professionalcynic
Summary: Currently a series of drabbles or vignettes of an OC, Hermes Hargreeves. Figured that since I was writing them, I might as well share. Tags and characters will be added as they appear.
Series: Chasing It Down [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955440





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To clarify, there are eight of them in this universe, and the numbers have correspondingly been slightly rearranged: Luther is One, Diego is Two, Allison is Three, Hermes is Four, Five is (surprise) Five, Klaus is Six, Ben is Seven, and Vanya is Eight.

It was June, and Four had never been so glad of anything as she was of that. It was June, just over a year since her brother’s vanishing act, and she was finally _free_. That being said, she had nowhere to go, and she knew it. At the very least, it was summer, so she’d have a whole season and a half before she’d really have to start worrying about the cold. In the meantime, she was reasonably confident in her own ability to get by until she was able to get some sort of foothold in the world.

She’d left with nothing except a backpack and the clothes on her back, and she considered herself fortunate to have even that much. Admittedly, there wasn’t much in the bag anyway- some clothes, toiletries, tools, and her sketchbook. A few first aid supplies, because her ankle was still throbbing painfully. A granola bar, just barely, because it wasn’t exactly easy to find non-perishable, easily accessible food in the house with mealtimes as meticulously curated as they had been. Food and water would have to be a top priority, right after getting as far away from That Bastard as possible, rivalled by a need to get out of her uniform and into unobtrusive civilian clothes. Step by step, as efficiently as possible. She’d find somewhere nobody would look for her just long enough to disappear, and then she’d be home free. As clever and ruthless as Reginald was, even he was hard pressed to find Four when she didn’t want to be found. Now, she was out in the world at large, and it would only become exponentially more difficult for him. She hoped.

* * *

Hermes was seventeen, and well on his way to becoming dangerous. He was already elusive, and enigmatic, but “dangerous” wasn’t a word that had come across him since his reinvention of himself. Even back in the day, years ago when he was bitter little infiltrator Four breaking and entering and destroying so-called criminals with his so-called siblings, “dangerous” was a word that was far better suited for other, stronger people. Two was dangerous. One was dangerous. Seven, for certain, was _dangerous_ : knives and eldritch horrors and brute force. Five had been dangerous, until he vanished, and then he couldn’t be dangerous to very much anyone at all, could he? Three was only dangerous if you could hear her, really, and Six was hardly dangerous at all, in the end. Hermes- Four- had always considered himself to be about on par with them. Sure, he could use a knife- but so could Diego and he could do it better. Much better. He could throw a punch, but not nearly as well as Luther. Four’s skills had been sticking to the shadows, getting in and out and information, inciting turmoil and causing misdirection so that her more _dangerous_ siblings could get their own jobs done. Four had been invisible, and had liked it that way, but Four was a child who didn’t know better.

Hermes was an adult, or near enough after years of self-sufficiency on the streets, and he still liked to be invisible. That, at least, hadn’t changed. He still got in and out and information, incited turmoil and caused misdirection, and stuck to the shadows, but now he did it for himself. No bastard pulling his strings or keeping him caged, and no team to defer to or fall back on. He found himself filling the gap of _dangerous_ on his own. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be as good with a knife and a fist as his brothers, but he could still jab and slash better than most people by a long margin. He would never be as viciously effective as the Horror, but really, who would want to be if _that_ was the option? Hermes could inspire fear and chaos just as well with his own abilities, and on top of that he could use a gun. “Dangerous” was a word that was beginning to look like himself.

He continued watching the screen passively, hands in his jacket pockets, idly fingering the folding knife tucked in the depths of the right. Holding himself to his brothers’ standards was absurd, he reflected. The way that they were, the things that they could do, were hardly reasonable marks by which to judge anyone else. They had superpowers, for fucks sake, and just because he had superpowers of his own didn’t mean that any one of them were entitled to feel insecure about not measuring up to any of the others. He’d never be as good with a knife as Two, but neither could anyone else. He was a damn sight better than most people he’d met, and that was more than good enough. He wasn’t as persuasive as Allison, but she had the power to literally control people’s minds and actions, so that was just about as preposterous as a standard could be. He was persuasive enough to talk himself in and out of what he needed to and had plenty of other skills to make up the difference when persuasiveness failed. Anyway, look where being dangerous had gotten them. One and Two were at each other’s’ throats, Five was gone, and Seven, apparently, was dead. Torn apart by his own Horror. What a way to go. He wondered how long it would be before the remainder of his family fell apart completely.


	2. Chapter 2

Prior to his abrupt departure from the Academy, he hadn’t really had any solid idea of what shape his future would take. Up until Five’s little stunt, he had tacitly assumed that the Academy would be his life forever. Most of his siblings had figured the same at that point, he thought. They were children, after all, and despite the things that they were trained to do they had stayed remarkably sheltered from the outside world. Certainly, Five had greater ambitions, but even now years later Hermes wasn’t convinced that his brother done what he did with the aspiration of _leaving_ the Academy. Five had wanted to be better, had wanted to be _right_ about his own capabilities, and as always was unwilling to accept that he could possibly have overestimated himself. Then again, they had been children, and despite the proximity of their numbers, Four and Five had never really been close. Five hadn’t really been “close” to anyone- except maybe Vanya, ironically.

The girls, Vanya and Allison, were probably the only ones of them who had really ever thought about a future outside of the Academy in those days. That had changed after Ben’s death, Hermes knew; he had kept tabs on his siblings just enough to know they had scattered to the winds soon after, and felt a bitter pleasure at knowing that nothing Reginald could do would be enough to weld his stupid super-team back together. Afterwards they all found a path forward, but Three and Eight had always been the ones who seemed to have plans- the former through ambition and dreams of stardom, and the latter simply through the need to have _something_ of her own. Eight had always been biding her time until she could fade away completely, and though she didn’t have Hermes’ ability to literally do so, Reginald had put her more than halfway there. That had taken some time to realize, but a year of forced house arrest did wonders for a fresh perspective on your family.

Looking back at the before-times, Hermes thinks that he had been on a trajectory similar to Klaus. Each of them had one foot out the door for years before actually leaving, but even after getting out- getting _free_ of the damn place- Klaus had changed very little. Hermes wondered, sometimes, if that’s what he would have been like, if Five hadn’t left. Physically, Six was free and at large, but the chains of the Academy were still dragging him down, and maybe always would be. Hermes ran his hands over the tattoos on his arms- broken chains and tentacles- and brooded. One foot in the city and one foot in the grave, and even after all these years Hermes couldn’t tell you exactly how much of that was metaphor and how much was the truth.

Four had gotten out. She hadn’t died or disappeared into infinity; she’d gotten out, metaphorically spat in Reginald’s monocle, and had never looked back. And if that was a lie, so what? He had the scars still to prove that escape, and years later he was still free. If he spent half his time looking over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop, so what? If he was on the move constantly, never owning property, never taking a real lease, never owning anything that couldn’t fit into his backpack or his own pockets, so what? It could have been paranoia, or a trauma response, or any number of other things, but just because that’s how he was didn’t mean it would hold him back. He was looking over his shoulder for more reason than one, now. He didn’t stay in one place because there was no point. If he seemed paranoid, it’s because there was more than one person who’d like to track him down on their terms rather than his, and that list was no longer limited to Reginald fucking Hargreeves. He hadn’t known what he was going to do with his life when he was suddenly confronted with a life that was his own to control, but he dared anyone to tell him now that he wasn’t thriving. Four had escaped, and Hermes bore her scars- not dead, not vanished, but spitefully alive and independent.

He ran his hands over the tattoos on his arms and glanced at the figure slumped on the ground at his side. Crouched in an alley, wearing a stranger’s face, he wrapped a hand around his oldest tattoo and waited silently, watching his brother’s shallow breaths and flickering eyelids and wondering what Seven would have done with his freedom, if he had lived long enough to see it.


End file.
